I wrote a post recently, Knowledge and Intuition, in which I created some minor confusion. This follow-up post doesn't make any really major new points, it just clarifies my previous intent so that, hopefully, I can build upon it another day.

It's ok to stop reading now if that's not your cup of tea. But if you haven't read the other one, you should read this first and then the other. It will make more sense that way.

My previous remarks were intended not to capture the mechanism of intuition as much as to attach a name to the goals, attitudes, expectations, hopes and even fears we have starting out in life.

And when I speak of children, I mean it in the most general and encompassing sense: people who have not yet been tested by life. People who have lived in the protective shell provided by their parents and society, and who have never had to fend for themselves in the world as it really is, with the responsibilities that society is prepared to place on them as first-class individuals.

For want of a better word, I refer to our starting image of the world as our “intuition.” It is a guided intuition, but it is an intuition nonetheless. Unlike the other animals, nature has equipped our minds to allow some of our intuitions to be downloaded from our parents. But what we teach children about civics is only intuitions compared to the reality of what it is to try to get what you need from a real-world government. What we teach people about having a job (or not having one), or about having a family, is just an intuition compared to the experience of actually doing. For purposes of this discussion, that quality which cannot be downloaded in advance and which is the tangible texture of life played out, I call “knowledge.”

Those words have other meanings in other contexts, and I'm not trying to co-opt or limit their meanings. I'm just trying to establish a window into my mind so you can see how I think about these things using the words I prefer.

And so, having been educated as children in our youth, we develop an expectation of how the world will play out. We imagine what the world will be. We have our intuitions. But the world is not, in fact, what we imagine. It cannot play out simply in the ways we imagine. What we come to know of the world will be at odds with those intuitions.

For some, life is a struggle between people and the world around them. How much can a person affect the world and how much does it affect them. It's easy for knowledge to wear down intuition; it's important to remember to constantly refresh one's intuitions so that we can make the world more like we'd like it to be, not just make ourselves more like the world wants us to be.

I may use these terms again, so I wanted to at least clarify my intent. And it may also make some of my meaning in the original post clearer.

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Public domain yin/yang symbol obtained from Wikipedia.

Text and composed artwork
Copyright © 2009 by Kent M. Pitman

This post is a sequel to my earlier post:
Knowledge and Intuition